As teachers, we only get but a few minutes to use the bathroom, right? I mean even though we are adults, our potty time is limited “by the man” and there are times when, let’s be honest, I am scared that, “Ain’t no way I am going to make it til the bell.”

Matter of fact, if Depends came out with a teacher diaper, being that I am on block schedule right now, I’d seriously consider it. (You know, with some little apple designs on it – maybe a Shakespearian quote or two line like, “To pee or not to pee, that is the question.”)

I betchya they’d sell a lot more than you think they would — we are not a proud bunch.

Okay, so maybe there are more sophisticated subjects about which to deliberate? And perhaps there are more elevated matters about which we should convene? And yes, there are a taxonomies and methodologies and cognitive psychologies about which we should talk.

But when you gotta pee, you gotta pee and sometimes the most well-equipped educator on campus is simply the one with the biggest bladder.

On Monday we had a department-wide staff meeting in my room and I felt the need to apologize to everyone. Why? Because the week prior I was feeling salty and frustrated and aggravated at having been asked by our administration to lead our ELA department out of the bowels of NCLB hell (I’m not even the Department Chair) and during the course of doing some internal, department wide PD I was doing, I was kinda blunt.

I was brusque.

Indeed, I was chippy.

And usually, that’s not me. But damn, my buttons were pushed.

I should know better though. I mean face it, in a way, teachers can be the absolute WORST audience for other teachers to teach. Every rule they have in their own room is a room is a rule they feel they can break when someone else is at the front board. They talk when they feel like it, take phone calls when they feel like it, and already know the answers to all the questions even before the questions are asked.

Forget about the tardiness factor. Sheesh… just show up whenever the heck you want, why don’t you?

And when you dare to suggest that they might in some, slight way be acting hypocritical for this behavior — even if you are right, you are wrong. Ya can’t win for losing.

Like I said… Sheesh!

This is why I have no real ambition to be an administrator. Wrangling teachers is like herding cats and sometimes, when the screws of NCLB are being turned and the district offices (and front offices) are looking to you to make academic magic occur on a data-driven level, it becomes exhaustive.

Give me kids any day of the week. I mean I do PD because 1) I can and 2) because I believe I have something worth offering. No magic bullets, but some good, sound tools that can help classroom teachers improve their own classroom practice while simultaneously taking more joy and positive, fulfilling, meaningful efficacy from the work of being a teacher. I do PD with a win/win mentality in mind.

But I work with kids because I love it. That’s where the soulful stuff is for me… and that makes all the difference between this being a job and this being my life’s work.

Working with adults in a school system — sometimes it’ll drive ya bonkers. I just don’t know why I can’t seem to remember that more often.

Yep, gimme kids any day of the week.

Nancie Atwell recently published this article in Education Week about THE CASE FOR LITERATURE. It’s well worth a read.

Perhaps one of the most telling parts of the article comes from this passage where Nancie writes…

In 2007, fully 70 percent of U.S. 8th graders read below the proficient level on the NAEP exam. Our 13-year-olds aren’t reading well because they’re not reading enough: The National Endowment for the Arts has reported that only 30 percent of students in this age group read every day.

Now, I am not sure about a heck of a lot of things in this world, but I am pretty sure that if English teachers are not going to require that their students read books, then very few others are going to step up and fill in the gap.

And as I see more and more of, English teachers all over are foregoing book reading as an essential, core component of their classroom. Some claim that teaching “skills” is where they focus. Some claim that reading annotated passages and excerpts is good enough. Some claim that their “district won’t let them” teach real books.

We all look out on the horizon of public education and see troubles. We all see silliness and problems. We all see Herculean challenges. But if we, in this nation of ELA teachers that we are, do not also see the need for us to be making sure that we are having our young students read books then we, as ELA teachers, are complicit in the demise of student achievement.

We can blame others for the dysfunction, the budgets cuts, the campus shortcomings and the national calamity of over-testing. But we have no one to blame but ourselves if we allow the reading of real books to die.

We are their torchbearers and if we do not seize the reigns and more loudly stand up for the fact that real books need to be a core part of the academic lives of all American students then we are as complicit in the demise of U.S. public education as are so many of the others at whom we so often point our fingers.

All heed Nancie Atwell – and ignore her work at our collective peril.

Since ya’ll know how much I love data-driven assessment, I decided to uncork a wee bit of Super Bowl data and show you why I deserve one of those high-fallutin’ ETS jobs, the kind that pays over six-figures if you are selected to work in the hallowed halls of this “non-profit” institution.

Stand back and watch I sew the seeds of Bubble Test Brilliance while using nothing but our Holy Day of pizza, chicken wings and potato chips to make our schoolchildren squeal.

(Cause if they don’t squeal, it’s not a good test question, is it?)

–4,000 tons of popcorn were estimated to have been eaten yesterday. If one would have stringed/strung/strunged all that popcorn together, the ring would circle the earth 5 1/2 times. According to this information, what is the earth’s radius? (Ya feelin’ me, ETS? Ya feelin’ me?)

–15,000 tons of chips were eaten. If an elephant weighs 2 3/4 tons and a textbook weighs 1/62,476 of a ton, how many textbooks would you need to stack up in order to equal the amount of potato chips our nation ate yesterday?

Please express you answer in terms of elephants.

–8 millions pounds of guacamole were consumed on Super Bowl Sunday which ranks second to Cinco de Mayo. How many English Language Learners does a school need to demonize in order to create enough guacamole to sustain us through 3 Cinco de Mayos in a Leap Year?

Helpful ETS hint we’ll offer to make sure all test questions are not culturally biased: Cinco de Mayo occurs on May 5th — except during a Leap Year when it occurs on, well… May 5th.

–Each year we, in America, eat 3 billion pizzas as a nation. During the Super Bowl 350 slices of pizza are being consumed each second over the course of a 12 hour day. If 1/11 of those pizzas are pepperoni and 1/14 are veggie, who was driving the pizza delivery car when it took them a freakin’ hour and a half to deliver Paulie and his drunk friends a cold pie?

Come on ETS, I am lofting softballs to ya right here. Think of the bubble tests that could be created from this American phenomenon!

Am I hired? Am I hired?

One last FYI… Did you know that Indianapolis public schools took Super Bowl Monday off? Yep, they shut down. Burned a snow day. And why? Cause last time the Colts went to the Super Bowl on the Monday which followed the game, 64% of the kids came down with what was affectionately named the “Blue Flu”… but their parents miraculously healed them all by Tuesday when attendance returned to normal.

So this year, IPS took no chances and called off school before the game even kicked off.

One day at school, the children in class began to identify the flavors of Life Savers by each of their colors:

Red…………………Cherry
Yellow……………..Lemon
Green……………….Lime
Orange …………..Orange

Finally the teacher gave them all HONEY lifesavers. None
of the children could identify the taste.

The teacher said, ‘I will give you all a clue. It’s what your
mother may sometimes call your father.’

One little girl looked up in horror, spit her lifesaver out and
yelled out, “Get rid of ‘em! Get rid of ‘em! They’re ass-holes!”

BTW, it’s Super Bowl weekend. How can ya not pull for the Saints?

As a writer, one of my favorite quotes about writing comes from Douglass Adams. He says: “I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.”

Too funny, right?

Well, it seems as if George Dubya Bush, once again, has a preposterous amount of egg on his face. Why? Because he set forth a ridiculous deadline that no one in the field of education (no one worth their salt, I should say) ever though would possibly be made and poof! now the Obama administration is left with cleaning up more of George Dubya Bush’s mess.

Seems that the “mandate” that all school children reach 100% academic proficiency by the year 2014 is gonna get yanked. (Read here for more.)

And why? Because this deadline was never anything more than a political platitude that Bush used to try and trump up goodwill for his political tenure anyway — crafted into policy at the expense of reality, of course. A reality, BTW, that he knew he’d never be on the hook for because his term in office would have long since been finished. (A few years too late on that front, if you ask me, but that’s fodder for another blog post.)

Yes, the aims of “closing the achievement gap” and “raising academic proficiency” are still going to stick around… but the deadline to do so is gonna be ka-boshed.

Still in Iraq, pulling the plug on NCLB’s proficiency deadline, financially reeling from deregulating the credit markets to the point of implosion while hunting for WMD’s that were trumped up to begin with… The guy makes Nixon look like Lincoln.

Whoosh! Ka-BOOM!

The sound of a deadline colliding with reality.

Last weekend I took my daughter to LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). I hadn’t been in a decade and WOW, was I blown away by the incredible experience.

LACMA is a really good museum. And I like really good museums. Why I haven’t been in more than 10 years, I have no idea.

Anyway, LACMA lured us to their museum with an offer of free art for kids. (My daughter’s 3 1/2 so what a great way to spend a Sunday, right?) Of course, it was a home run. Of course, there were scores and scores of other parents taking advantage of the day. Of course, 10 minutes after I arrived I was thinking to myself, “Why haven’t I waited so long?”

And then the nice lady at LACMA asked my daughter if she wanted to become a member of the museum. She said “Yes!” without asking the price. (She does that a lot.) But as it turns out, the price was free.

As it turns out, they gave her a free membership until she turns 18. It’s called NexGen. And everytime she comes, we get one free adult admission as well.

“Cool!” I said. “What a great program.”

“Yeah, well, we have to develop the next generation of artists and kids people who appreciate art,” the lady told me. “Cause our stupid schools sure ain’t,” she said.

Owch!

It was an unprompted comment. She didn’t even know I was a teacher. She just blasted away with a genuine sense of nobility about what she was doing combined with contempt for what our schools are doing mixed in her voice.

And I could not have agreed more completely.

Is modern day education striving to stamp out the human spirit on purpose or is all this nonsense just a by-product of stupidity, short-sightedness and an a fear that if we do not create enough child-widgets, our country is going to turn into a widget-less adult workforce?

As the proverb says, “Man cannot live by bread alone.”

I am kicking around a new book idea about the need for single-tasking in a world where people sing the praises a bit too loudly about the ability to multi-task.

(But since I kick around new book ideas all the time, it’s probably best just to blog about it and see if the itch is still there to scratch at the end of this post.)

Multi-taking, in the modern world, is something we all do. Talking on the phone while googling an address as someone speaks to you from the other side of the room — come on, how many of us haven’t done that?

And yet, for some reason, white collar employees seem to think that there is merit to functioning like this all the time.

Sure, it produces voluminous work but the truth is, I want quality over quantity. And quality oh-so-very-often is sacrificed in this day and age at the altar of expediency.

With my students, this a growing subject of conversation in my class. (It’s also why I am such a HUGE fan of reading. Reading — particularly reading longer works, like, ahem, real books — is a single-tasking job. One simply cannot read a novel like The Alchemist and google, talk and change songs on your iPod at the same time.

Not that my students don’t try… but the quality of their comprehension will be sacrificed in direct correlation to the amount of attention they willingly divert from the task at hand.

And btw, when I am on the consuming end of the scale — when someone prepares a meal for me, when someone checks my cholesterol by taking a blood sample, when someone valet parks my car — I want them to be single-tasking at the time. I don’t want them talking on the phone while trying to find a vein in my arm. I want their focus… their single-minded focus.

Why? Because single-taskers translate to “better” taskers.

In my own class, one of the ways I greatly improve my students’ writing over the course of a year in English is that I make them concentrate on the small things. The details. The apostrophes, the spelling, the periods at the end of sentences and the such. It might not like sound much but when you see the quality of the work they enter with each year versus the quality of writer they have become by the time they leave, it’s night and day.

Because they concentrate. Because they pay attention. Because I force them to focus and they produce high quality sentences line by line by line.

Being slovenly is disastrous to a crisp thinker. And in the age of txt messages, Facebook, Twitter and so on, just slapping something out is all too easy.

Multi-taskers go a mile wide and an inch deep throughout their careers. Single-taskers go a mile deep… and then they go a mile deep again. They eventually get to breadth as a result of depth — and when all is said and done’ I’d venture to say that it all adds up to a lot more substance when the final tallies are tallied.

Multi-taskers are under the false delusion that they are going someplace quick but in my opinion, it’s intellectual laziness that keeps them flitting from one thing to the next all the time like a moth on red bull.

Single-taskers will cure cancer.
Single-taskers will take green energy to a whole new level.
Single-Taskers Will Rule the World!

And reading is the training camp for single-taskers. In my opinion, letting the red herring of “21rst century skills” undercut deep instruction that demands extended concentration will be a grave mistake. We, in our classrooms today, must overtly recognize this quicksand.

So, is there a possible book here? I think so, if I fleshed it out more, did some research, flavored the whole thing up with anecdotes, provided an 8 Step recipe for Single-Tasking Success, and so on. But do I feel the need to spend a huge amount of time writing this book at the expense of a what could easily be a new work of YA fiction for me? Probably not.

This is why I blog. It allows me to multi-task. (wink-wink.)

Look, let’s be honest for a minute. If you have been reading me for any length of time at all you have probably noticed that the past wee bit has seen a more cynical, jaded bite — a sharpened, more cutting blog-edge tone, if you will.

I admit it. I’ve darkened.

But the thing is, well… there are a few things. For one, if we are going to be really honest, this freakin’ job is freakin’ hard. And between the budget cuts and the bastards and the buffoons, it would take a saint not to get rattled by the crap we all face at both my school and in public education on the whole.

And I ain’t no f*&%kin saint.

This stuff is meaningful to me, this stuff hits me hard and this stuff impacts my life and the lives of my kids – and peers – in deep, significant ways.

My students get one chance to be teenagers in school and SO, SO, SO many consequences that will resonate throughout the rest of their lives are being manipulated by puppeteers that seem to have no shame about doing what is in their own personal, best, self-interest before considering what is in the best interest of the students we have been hired to serve.

My cynicism is a by-product of naiveté some might say… cause I believe I can change things – or at least impact things for the better – and I get really frustrated when I lay it all on the line and still, things roll downhill.

If I could be more zen-like, I’d be much better off. All I can say to that is, I am a work in progress — so please don’t submit final grades just yet.

However, I also know that things are cyclical in a school year and right now, we are in the thick of the jungle in a whole host of ways. Stress runs high during times like these and when you work 90-100 hours a week and still feel as if you are spinning your wheels, it gets maddening.

But we’re gonna get out of it. And this too shall pass. There are more fart blogs in me. Yes, I will write 800 words on “The booger-pickers of 4rth period”. (Note to self: Hey, that’s a good book title.)

The joy, the laughs, the ridiculous smiles, it’s all still there. I guess I just take this all-too-seriously in some ways, sometimes. See, I bought into the propaganda hook, line and sinker. I believe in kids, I believe in teaching, I believe in education, and I believe in serving the greater good of society. (And all that other nonsense.)

When you care about things, you open yourself up to being hurt. That’s just a law of the universe or something.

If I just wanted a job for the sake of pulling a paycheck, I would have become a lawyer. Really. Then again, knowing me, I probably would have become a bleeding heart, public defendant, still working for the government rambling on about pillars of the Constitution because a leopard doesn’t ever really change their spots, now do they? (Truth is, I have immense regard for some lawyers. My dad and grandfather were both barristers; sounds more high fallutin’ when you say it that way.)

So know this. I may be down and gettin’ kicked around in the mud right now but that’s because nobody in our field (that I know of) escapes that aspect of this work.

And I don’t trust people who pretend that it’s never like this — or sell you perpetual rose-colored glasses. It’s just untrue.

So me, when I am down at the bottom of the barn rollin’ around in professional pigshit, I kinda relish it. Why? Because I guess I figure if you are gonna rise to great heights in this world, it seems as if you must also plumb some pretty low depths, too.

The encroachment of cynicism on my writing — it’s there, but it’s not permanent. Not as long as I still find joy in the farting booger-pickers of 4rth period it isn’t.

Cause when that joy is gone, so am I.

How can anyone be expected to manage a situation that they do not really understand?

And how can anyone really understand a situation unless they are actually in that situation?

It is for this reason that I believe ALL school administrators should be required to teach at least one class in K-12 schools.

Yep, the Principal needs to teach a class.
The Vice Principals need to teach a class.
The Superintendent and their cabinet of decision-makers need to teach a class.
The School Board personnel need to teach a class.

If they can, that is.

And by “if they can” I don’t mean “if they can carve out the time in their schedule to do so.” School meets with clockwork regularity. (Most start by 8:15 a.m. I am not even sure if half the people on the aforementioned list are actually working by this hour.) By 9:30 or so they’ll be done and the insight they’ll gain from actually being in a room with real kids — ones they are responsible for “academically elevating” — will trump any study they could ever hope to not read. (Come on, we all know they have people summarize this stuff for them in mono-syllabic terms.)

BTW, I am not even sure if all of these people I mention even hold a teaching credential. Hmm, what does it say about people who sit in positions of policy making power when they do not even have the certification to legally give them the right to do the job over which they lord.

Come on, slum with the plebeians. Let’ em all teach 1 period. Why not?

Are they too busy?
Are they unable to perform?
Are they scared?

And just because they “used to do it” 17 years ago doesn’t mean they can do it now. It’s an iPod, google, hit me on the cellie with a txt message world and these folks think that just because they stood at a chalkboard when Ronald Reagan was president they can still strap it up and deliver real results?

Ba-hum-bug-bullshit!

Make ‘em do what they mandate us to do and watch what they mandate morph.

Cuz ya know that when you have to eat the food that you are cooking, the meal always becomes more palatable.